Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2010/611

Abstract: National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a competition in 2008, of which the winner will be acknowledged as the new hash standard SHA-3. There are 14 second round candidates which are selected among 51 first round algorithms. In this paper, we apply statistical analysis to the second round candidate algorithms by using two different methods, and observe how conservative the algorithms are in terms of randomness. The first method evaluates 256-bit outputs, obtained from reduced round versions of the algorithms, through statistical randomness tests. On the other hand, the second method evaluates the randomness of the reduced round compression functions based on certain cryptographic properties. This analysis gives a rough idea on the security factor of the compression functions.